GÉANT and the NRENs have the infrastructure capabilities and expertise to offer advanced, special-purpose networking services and requirements that enable more intelligent and efficient operations to overcome traditional service provisioning and operational models. Additionally, the current the current trends and wide adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies offer a fertile environment from which the development and provisioning of network services can benefit.
The Joint Research Activity 2 (JRA2) of the GN4 project aims to leverage on SDN technology to architecturally define and specify a number of advanced network service models and operational capabilities in the GÉANT-NREN context, in order to bring services closer to users and enable them with advanced control and management
capabilities. The specification has extended the models of existing GÉANT services and has also defined service models in the form of 5 use cases:
 Evolution of Bandwidth on Demand (BoD): SDN-based BoD service offerings.
 Software-defined Internet Exchanges and SDN-based IP services.
 Software-controlled intra-campus provisioning: Network in the Campus (NitC).
 SDN and Network-as-a-Service offerings within the Data Center.
 SDN-based Optical layer service offerings.